John Bell regarded gauge choices, as (E,B)-theorists do, as conventions. His famous example [1]} is that of British sovereignty: “when the Queen of England dies in London, the Prince of Wales becomes instantaneously King." But nobody is particularly bothered by this kind of non-locality, since the property of being the British sovereign is not a local beable, nor any kind of beable: it is a convention. In this Pickwickian sense, conventions can indeed travel faster than light. In his 1976 paper on local beables, Bell writes
